In seminar yesterday, Professor Diaz came into our class to discuss the world of cinema. At first glance, I questioned to myself how someone could possibly be a cinema professor, but ten minutes into her lecture, I was amazed at how much goes into making a movie, as well as the major details that I casually look over and don’t analyze fully. I thought it was crazy, how a movie that is displayed for the audience, doesn’t represent the amount of time and hard work that goes into making the particular motion picture; unless professors in that respected field analyze it thoroughly such as, Professor Diaz.
Instead of going on and on about the terms that were discussed in the lecture, I would like to highlight some of the important ones; which happen to be mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, sounds, and framing. Mise-en-scene is all of the elements that are placed in front of the camera to be photographed. Cinematography is simply the use of cameras and other machines to record images.The next term, editing is piecing together of individual shots. Sounds are the voices, effects, and music that blend on film’s sound track. Finally, framing is important because it actively defines the image for us. It’s not simply a neutral border. The frame, in cinema, imposes a certain vantage point onto the material within the image.
To be honest, I was kind of bored during the first half of Professor Diaz’s lecture only because she was just reciting cinema terms that didn’t really mean anything to me. But once she applied the new concepts to various well–renowned movies, I became interested and it definitely appealed to me. I never thought of movies such as the Godfather and other gangster movies in relation to the lighting and the clothing. I just took the movie for its face value and never dug deeper and examined the various terms that Professor Diaz discussed. Now I think of all movies in a different but unique manner. All of the concepts such as: lighting, clothing, scenery, color, storyboard enable me to formulate a more conceptual and idealistic view on the particular movie that can be supported by different scenes; instead of just coming up with a logical explanation without any concrete forms of evidence.
